Cover Photo: illustration of a multi-hued, rather surreal-looking landscape, with a row of three trees and mountains beyond, and a computer screen in the distance with a river running out of it—the scene is repeated infinitely in the computer screen
Illustration by Sirin Thada for Catapult

What Kind of Sonnets Will Computers Write?

If poetry is an act of discovery for a writer, then even a computational poem has to uncover something new.

Computers can outperform people. I have never beaten a calculator at long division or memorized the entire catalog of a library. But soon after I started a doctorate in computer science, I began to realize just how much computers were inching their way into new and wild domains. When I heard of a presentation on a computer program that would purportedly help you write a short story, I had to attend.

New Yorker

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Katy Ilonka Gero (@katyilonka) is a poet, essayist, and computer scientist. Her writing has been published in Electric Literature, Pigeonholes, the Blueshift Journal (RIP), and more. She was a Winter- Spring 2020 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and a 2021 Tin House Winter Workshop attendee. She is pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Columbia University and working on a poetry manuscript called ‘whalefall’.